Hip-Hop Dreams and Indian Fantasy

I’d skimmed a couple of online accounts of the Netflix Original movie “The After Party” before watching it (it debuted Aug. 24), and got the impression that it was a down-and-dirty, inside-hip-hop movie. It really isn’t. Written and directed by Ian Edelman and produced in part by WorldStarHipHop.com (the movie is dedicated to that popular site’s founder, Lee O’Denat, known as Q, who died in 2017), “The After Party” is a young-adult comedy in hip-hop clothing.

Sometimes the hip-hop trappings are deliberately unconvincing, as shown in a scene featuring Jeff (Harrison Holzer), best friend and manager of Owen (Kyle Harvey, who raps in real life under the single name Kyle), two post-high-schoolers out for a big break. On the train home from an impromptu men’s room “audition” for a guy who turns out to be the unpaid intern for the record label bigwig they were hoping to impress, Jeff and Owen trade rhymes with a conductor who wonders if they know “real” hip-hop. After establishing their Rakim bona fides, the conductor says to Jeff, who is not just white but conspicuously white: “Your outfit is wow corny, son. Who you tryin’ to be?” To which Jeff sputters: “Myself. With a hint of the Migos.” He pauses and gulps. “Is it too much? Migos?”

Humor of this kind suffuses the movie, which at its best is an amiable cartoon. When Owen gets too stoned to function at a hip-hop showcase, he projectile-vomits onto the real-life rapper Wiz Khalifa and passes out onstage; via viral video he earns the nickname Seizure Boy, and the movie has its joke two ways by endlessly repeating it and then having one of the characters who’s parroting it make note of how objectionable the phrase is. Encouraged to join the Marines by his restaurant-owner dad (Blair Underwood, and it’s always nice to see him) Owen is hectored by Jeff to give him one last shot. They have been promised a hearing from a label rep at a French Montana show the night before he heads to camp. Complicating matters is Owen’s longtime crush (more like fixation) on Jeff’s older sister, Alicia, who will also be attending.

Not that the ensuing evening lacks for other challenges. It always does. On their way to the after-party (“No matter how exclusive the party is, there’s always gonna be a place more exclusive,” Jeff grouses) the two are obliged to hit a strip club. There’s a car-and-motorcycle chase that recalls a scene from “Risky Business.” There’s a 13-year-old mutineer from a bat mitzvah who snaps at Jeff and Owen, “Can you guys get me coke or not?” There’s a lot of cheerfully articulated sexism, which I presume Edelman presumes is mitigated by a couple of assertive female characters. I don’t know about that. A vulgar turn of phrase concerning Owen’s not-entirely-noble intentions toward Jeff’s sister is repeated too often and with too much relish.

For all of that, the movie is relentlessly fluffy. Edelman was the creator of the short-lived HBO series “How to Make It in America,” which was notable for a not wholly inaccurate but largely toothless depiction of downtown New York mores; “The After Party” makes “How to Make It” look like “Last Exit to Brooklyn” by comparison.

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This month Netflix announced it would be creating an original series called “Baahubali: Before the Beginning,” with a premiere date yet to be announced. The first season of this Indian period fantasy epic will have nine episodes of unspecified lengths. The series is a prequel to two movies, “Baahubali: The Beginning” (2015) and “Baahubali 2: The Conclusion” (2017), which were huge hits, primarily with overseas theater audiences. (The second picture grossed $20 million in the United States.) They are both streaming on Netflix now.

These Telugu-language films have, if not quite everything, then almost. A very convoluted plotline encompassing secret identities, royal intrigues and stealth tattooing. (You’ll know what I’m talking about when you see it.) The action features swordplay, ax play, fist fighting, and computer-generated bulls and elephants. The saga begins with a woman carrying a baby through rough river waters; she is forced to abandon it, and the infant is later found, floating, by villagers, and adopted. Every now and then the action stops so a character can make an impassioned speech about vengeance or justice. Or to allow the two romantic leads, Prabhas and Tamannaah — and later, others — to do a musical number, for which their everyday clothing is swapped for colorful, scanty costumes. Both movies are entertaining in that discursive way Bollywood movies are, and I was particularly intrigued by the appeal of Tamannaah, who’s formidably sexy and strong. I’m curious as to whether an episodic television series will replicate the rambling immersiveness of the movies. One of the most diverting original supplements on the Criterion Channel of the FilmStruck site is “Adventures in Moviegoing,” a series of interviews, each about 20 minutes long, in which a prominent figure in the arts talks movies. In the episode posting Sept. 6, the interview subject is director and performer Paul Feig, whose coming film, “A Simple Favor,” is a mystery, which is new territory for him. (But as it’s a mystery with women as its central characters, it’s in keeping with Feig’s raucous comedies, among them the 2011 film “Bridesmaids.”)

Interviewed by Sam Wasson (the author of an acclaimed biography of Bob Fosse), Feig amiably recalls the films that formed his tastes. From a blue-collar background, he had to teach himself when it came to art movies, but his mother had adventurous taste. When Feig was 12, she took him to see Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” which resulted in some awkwardness when a nude scene came up. As someone who wheedled his grandmother into taking him to see Hitchcock’s “Frenzy” at 13, I can both relate, and think I have him beat in the awkwardness department.

There are about 20 episodes so far, and one thing that makes the series distinct is that the interviewees aren’t always “movie people.” Poet and memoirist Mary Karr and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri are both interviewed by writer and academic Antonio Monda (in my view the best-dressed professor at Tisch School of the Arts, where I’m an adjunct). Basketball legend and prolific writer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is interviewed by the terrific filmmaker Philip Kaufman. My buddy Bill Hader, actor and co-creator of HBO’s “Barry,” and a cinephile of great range, is interviewed by Peter Becker, president of the Criterion Collection. And so on. In a relatively quiet way, the Criterion Channel is bringing extras worthy of its physical media label to the FilmStruck site.